Abbott: 4 degree rise "not the greatest moral challenge"

Needs a new climate adviser

You have to wonder who is advising Tony Abbott on climate. This kind of comment plays straight into the warmists’ hands, especially as we wait for the Coalition’s climate policy, due on Tuesday:

It will deliver the same carbon pollution reduction as Labor’s emissions trading scheme but for a “comparatively modest cost”, he told a Young Liberals convention in Adelaide on Saturday.

Mr Abbott also mocked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for declaring climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time.

“It’s an important issue but even if dire predictions are right and average temperatures around the globe rise by four degrees over the century, it’s still not the ‘great moral challenge’ of our time – as Mr Rudd has described it on 14 occasions – let alone the ‘greatest’ moral challenge of our time – as Mr Rudd has described it at least four times,” Mr Abbott said.

“Adapting to changing rainfall patterns, for example, will be hard but it won’t supplant the threat of war, injustice, disease and want as the biggest problems with which humanity must grapple.”

And, naturally, here is the response:

The Climate Institute’s chief executive John Connor said it was reckless and ridiculous for Mr Abbott to be relaxed about a four-degree rise in global temperatures.

“He’s missed the link that such an increase will, in fact, lead to greater insecurity and instability around the world and particularly in our region.

“It will lead to very significant public health impacts and disease.”

And I’d have to agree that a 4 Celsius rise would probably have an enormous effect on the planet. Tony Abbott has tacitly admitted that the “dire projections” of the IPCC have some validity, whereas in reality the credibility of the alarmist science is disappearing faster than a Himalayan glacier. The point he should have made is that Rudd’s “great moral challenge” could not be based on flawed models and dodgy science.

Read it here.